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Re: native symlink
- From: Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin at cygwin dot com>
- To: cygwin-developers at cygwin dot com
- Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2013 12:34:50 +0200
- Subject: Re: native symlink
- References: <5153759A dot 7080307 at cygwin dot com> <79518574-72AB-451F-ACE3-3277981987D5 at mac dot com> <20130401195216 dot GA7174 at ednor dot casa dot cgf dot cx> <9A868E84-96C2-486C-98DF-3FF5079ACD50 at mac dot com> <20130402000633 dot GA3977 at ednor dot casa dot cgf dot cx> <9362C76C-DB6B-4DA8-B61E-7980CFDF7A8A at mac dot com> <20130403014056 dot GA3383 at ednor dot casa dot cgf dot cx> <2EC5409B-C507-4B41-862C-D42D69CE3741 at mac dot com> <515BB10C dot 9080101 at openafs dot org> <20130403152907 dot GD2468 at calimero dot vinschen dot de>
- Reply-to: cygwin-developers at cygwin dot com
On Apr 3 17:29, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> Cygwin is a POSIX environment in the first place. Interop is fine,
> but if it collides with POSIX, we're clearly favoring POSIX.
>
> Having said that.
>
> Chris and I had a private discussion (not the first one on the subject!)
> and we're willing to revisit the use of native symlinks in Cygwin but
> it will be a while before that happens. A change to the path handling
> code like this is not something that we'd consider for 1.7.18 which is
> long overdue anyway.
>
> What I will do is to add a new CYGWIN environment variable option, along
> the lines of the winsymlinks option(*), or, which is very likely the
> more elgant solution, a mount option, which will result in trying to
> create native symlinks first, and a Cygwin symlink only if creating
> a native symlink failed. That should help you along.
I just applied a patch to CVS which adds AFS support as well as native
symlink support. On AFS, native symlinks are used exclusively, on any
other filesystem supporting native symlinks Cygwin will try to create
them if you specify "winsymlinks:native" in the $CYGWIN environment
variable.
After mulling over this problem I found that using an environment
solution is better than the mount point solution, because this allows
on-the-fly creating of native symlinks in certain scenarios, while the
default can be kept at using Cygwin sysfile symlinks, which are still
better suited for a POSIX environment.
For completeness, you can also specify "winsymlinks:lnk" or just
"winsymlinks". This will result in trying to generate shortcut
type symlinks, as before.
Jeffrey, please give especially AFS at try here.
HTH,
Corinna
--
Corinna Vinschen Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat